Living, dying (and flying) artworks — Inside Anicka Yi’s ephemeral universe

By Jacqui Palumbo, CNN

New York (CNN) — In New York’s Hudson Valley, the artist Anicka Yi has erected columns bursting with mercurial microbial life, in hues of acid green and coffee, arranged like an archaeological dig at Storm King Art Center. Some 60 miles away, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, two of her jellyfish-like flying machines take to the air on the fourth floor of the recently reopened New Museum, tentacles gently opening and closing as they drift overhead. And, earlier this month, one of her radiolaria-inspired sculptures, an oceanic unicellular organism made large with fiber optic strands and motors, hung suspended at the art fair Frieze New York, hypnotically curling its arms.

For better or worse, we are living in a time when our relationships to both machine and microbe are heightened — and perhaps wondering which might take us out for good first. But Yi has ruminated on these interconnections for more than two decades, making visible (and, sometimes, odorous) the systems around us that are microscopic, impermanent, or technologically abstract, often questioning our discomfort with them. She’s swabbed bacteria from successful women to create perfume, placed thousands of ants in an observable circuit-board-shaped colony, and created ecosystems for machines to learn within.

The South Korean-born, Brooklyn-based artist explained from her sunlit studio in Greenpoint that she’s fortunate to have reached the point in her career where her works have formed a larger universe.

“I hope that people who are familiar with my practice can thoughtfully weave these works together and see the broader syntax that I’m aiming for,” she said. “It takes time to develop that kind of scope and depth — (ideas) need to age and season and marinate, and you can’t do that as a young artist.”

Yi’s studio is filled with the remnants of her works. Glass biomorphic prototypes sit on shelves next to a collection of fragrances, with a bottle of Chanel No. 5 mixed in among her own proprietary scents. Cocoon-like lanterns lay open on a table. Samples of dyed and embroidered kelp are kept and numbered in bags on a board. A lone prototype from her Storm King commission stands in one corner, murky with the soil and water from the grounds of the sculpture park.

Yi has conjured a scene of ephemerality in “Message from the Mud,” through these column-dwelling microorganisms that are sensitive to light and heat and will only be displayed through the sculpture park’s summer season. The structures sit in a shallow pond at the center of excavated earth, like a ruined archaeological discovery from long ago.

“It’s a great way to encapsulate something about this deep history and deep time that Storm King stands on, and that goes so far beyond human time,” she said.

Uncertain outcomes

Like Yi’s previous endeavors making “living paintings” from bacterial cultures, the structure for “Message from the Mud” utilizes Winogradsky columns — small, self-contained ecosystems invented by the Russian-Ukrainian microbiologist Sergei Winogradsky a century and a half ago. Inside the columns, microbes and algae establish different zones over time, creating vividly hued layers. In Yi’s, they form from the local soil and pond water she’s included, in addition to some added ingredients, such as shredded newspapers for carbon, eggshells for calcium, and diatomaceous earth.

The other ingredient is time, she explained, “so they’ve just been cooking for two years.” That’s taken place in a heated onsite barn under UV lights. Unlike the artist’s precise algorithmic-based works, her Winogradsky columns are based on uncertainty. Without the right environmental variables, the microbial neighborhoods will simply die off — and Yi has also thought through all the left-field scenarios that could have jeopardized the work.

“I was actually a little concerned that bears would come to the installation once it was up and that they would just tip over the columns,” she said, laughing. “But they’re pretty securely fastened to the ground.” (She is, however, looking forward to turtles and frogs joining the pond they sit within.)

Nora Lawrence, executive director of Storm King, said in a phone call that she’d wanted to work with Yi for several years. It’s the artist’s first outdoor installation, and a true collaboration with the natural environment.

“She’s thinking about art that’s made beyond the visual, and art that can, in a lot of ways, continue to shape itself without that much continuous interaction from the artist, either because of technology or because of natural growth,” said Lawrence. Over the two years that Yi visited the columns to track their progress, Lawrence recalled, “every change delighted her — the ways in which the works were constantly changing color, changing patterns, moving and growing in front of our eyes. It showed this real allowance of the work to become different things.”

Yi explained that she initially imagined the work as a portrait of the surrounding region through all types of life: human, animal, plant and microbial. But when an artist friend commented to her that the work was an “anti-monument,” that description clicked into place, too.

“I started my practice with the ephemeral, the perishable as a protest against this monumentality of art that had been handed down to my generation by the modernists and especially the 1960s minimalist sculptors,” she said. “I wanted to make more impermanent statements, because we’re all impermanent.”

Deep listening

Yi’s entry point into the STEM world began inward, when studying her own body. She experienced gut health issues that became chronic, sending her down rabbit holes about the ways in which bacteria were exerting power over her own life. Her background had “nothing to do” with science, she explained. She’d studied film theory and philosophy, and she credits the latter, which sharpened her aptitude for deep thinking and disentangling abstract ideas, with forming the backbone of her practice. She collaborates with scientists to develop and execute her works, such as the microbiologist Frank Cusimano, who assisted her on her first foray into Winogradsky cultures at the Venice Biennale in 2019. She also says — though she dislikes the phrase — that she “crunches” a lot of books every month. Currently, she’s working on an undisclosed AI project with a neuroscientist who is helping her navigate her ideas around machine consciousness.

But Yi has always been drawn to the discomfort we have with bacteria and viruses, as well as the vast untapped knowledge they contain. Once again, it’s all too relevant as both Hantavirus and Ebola make headlines, five years after her major Tate Modern commission opened during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“I feel it everywhere. I feel the potency,” she said. “We’re talking about these pandemics, these microorganisms. They’re calling the shots and it’s as pervasive as the air that we breathe.” She added: “There’s such a dense intelligence there. It just seems like I should be listening to that.”

The themes Yi deals with could push her work towards dread, fear or alarm. But instead, she presents her work with the same curiosity that drives it, staging playful or contemplative settings, often with multiple sensory points of discovery.

That was the case with “In Love With the World,” the helium-filled flying machines she developed for Tate Modern, two of which now appear at the New Museum. In both settings, they are completely autonomous, varying their flight paths behavior based on information they take in each time. Two technicians sit near them during their flights to refill their helium and change their batteries when they land. (They also have a manual override in case of emergency, according to Yi’s studio).

The machines, called “aerobes,” are currently part of a larger exhibition at the New Museum called “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” a sprawling multi-floor show with hundreds of works by artists, filmmakers, architects and scientists, that often examine our fraught relationship to machines or the inequalities deepened by technology. She’s visited the show a number of times, she said, and is happy to see the work “co-existing” with the rest, though she recognizes she’s an outlier from the artists who look to the relationship critically, or with fear.

“She thought it would bring levity or a sense of optimism that maybe the entire exhibition doesn’t have,” explained Massimiliano Gioni, who leads the New Museum’s curatorial team. “There is an immediate sense of elation, or fantastical surprise when you see them.”

At the Tate, the aerobes occupied their own little ecosystem up high in the Turbine Hall, wafting to and from one another in groups. But at the New Museum, they are in dialogue with all of the exhibition’s works. Because of that, Gioni can’t help but see them a bit ominously, perhaps reminiscent of drones, or the spindly aliens from the 2005 movie “War of the Worlds.” No matter the read, he believes that despite the machines’ futuristic appeal, like many of her works, she’s tapping into something more ancestral, be it dreams of taking flight or aversions to disease.

Yi said she has been guilty of over explaining in the past, and now she doesn’t like to set people up for the experience they’ll have. She maintains she’s no scientific expert, but is instead learning alongside her viewers.

Lately, she’s been enjoying the symbiosis within her own practice. Her radiolaria-inspired sculptures were born from a series of “Alien Ocean” paintings made in collaboration with machine-learning algorithms trained on her earlier works. She’s returned to Winogradsky columns after experimenting with them on a smaller scale. Her bacteria cultures could become a fragrance or an image, or all of the above. “It’s just this gooey kind of exchange,” she said, smiling — not unlike her Storm King installation, with all the millions of tiny relationships forming in the mud.

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